Without a specific reason for wanting to be in a population the question is meaningless in my opinion, one could have all sorts of reasons in theory, so I'll assume that the point is to maximise your descendants. So I suppose the question boils down to what is the representation of each population in the multiverse, assuming there really IS a multiverse...
The human-a population is constant, barring accidents, while pop-b will bifurcate every 70 years into two branches with 3 in one and 0 in the other. This will also bifurcate pop-a into 1 offspring in each branch, so it seems like b gets 1.5 offspring per generation, on average over the multiverse. However, once pop-b stops, presumably it stops for good. So all the possible branches of the "multiverse tree" that fan out from the root to the "no descendants" side are empty of pop-b, assuming the world continues to branch at the same rate, e.g. once every 70 years in all branches, regardless of who is in each branch. Pop-b only continues down a single branch, which is equivalent to getting a continuous row of heads in a quantum coin toss. After N generations there will be 1 branch with 3^N pop-b descendants and 2^N-1 branches empty of pop-b, each with a member of pop-a. Overall, at generation N a pop-a member will have 2^N descendants spread over 2^N branches, while a pop-b member has 3^N descendants in one branch. So pop-b grows a lot faster over the entire multiverse, 1,3,9,27,81... as opposed to 1,2,4,8,16... So pop-b wins out, as long as there is definitely a multiverse involved. Otherwise (with wavefunction collapse) the chance of there being ANY pop-b members at generation N is only 1 in 2^N, so although the "total expected payoff" for pop-b exceeds that for pop-a one might still decide to go for a safe, but smaller, amount of happiness, because without a multiverse one is gambling on something with astronomical odds against it, everntually, like winning the lottery (since the *entire* pop-b goes extinct once the coin toss comes out tails).. If so, then the answer is ... Use the above maths to work out the expected descendants for each population, i.e. 1.5 to 1, then multiply that result by your confidence in the multiverse existing. So if you are 50% confident, the result becomes 0.75 to 1 and you should go for pop-a; if you're 90% confident you get 1.35 to 1 and should go for pop-b. Now to read that paper, when I have the time... -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
